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Aporeto Addresses Security for Cloud-Native Applications

When it comes to security, everybody else in the marketplace is working to sell a faster horse, but Aporeto is selling a car, said Amir Sharif, a co-founder of the startup.

Aporeto’s value proposition is to transform networks into flat Layer 3 infrastructures without access control lists or firewalls, which Sharif said eliminates the need for subnets and VLANs, uses white lists instead of black lists, and makes things more manageable. The company’s Trireme solution was designed to be simple, scalable, and secure, and to offer an example of how cloud-native applications can become secure by default, Sharif told me during an interview earlier this month at TMC Editors’ Day in Santa Clara, Calif.

“In the software development world, we are running faster, but we are not running safer,” Sharif wrote in a Nov. 1 blog, which also talked about DevOps and microservices. “At Aporeto, we are solving these problems, and this is why we released Trireme today. Trireme makes it possible to set up security policies at scale and segment applications by enforcing end-to-end authentication and authorization. There is no need for complex control planes or IP/port-centric ACLs and east-west firewalls.”

Aporeto plans to announce its first commercial customer in the first quarter of next year. But recently it released Trireme, an open source project offered on GitHub for segmenting cloud-native applications orchestrated by Kubernetes. Although Trireme is extensible and can work with an orchestration framework, Aporeto chose to align its early efforts with Kubernetes, which is the most popular container orchestration solution today. And Kubernetes creator Google has endorsed Trireme.

Sharif, who formerly worked at Parallels and VMware, founded Aporeto with CEO Dimitri Stiliadis, the former CTO and co-founder of Nuage Networks, and a former Bell Labs Research guy; and Vice President of Engineering Satyam Sinha, a former distinguished engineer with Cisco’s Insieme business unit, and a past TiMetra employee.